Ecma-48 proposed styling controls update updated & math expression representation proposal update

[William_J_G Overington]

It is often difficult to convey the tone of a post in an email, so I 
begin by saying that this is not in any way critical, that I know very 
little about this topic yet I am trying to learn, that I would be 
grateful if you regard these comments and questions as if an informal 
chat over cups of whatever in a common room somewhere someplace and of 
me trying to be helpful if I can.

What exactly are you trying to achieve please? For example, as well as 
keeping readers of this mailing list informed, for which I thank you, 
are you trying to persuade a specific committee somewhere to change a 
specific existing standard?

Sometime somewhere I was advised and I have added my own thoughts that 
the way to improve one's chances of getting something - whatever it is - 
done is to write a letter on no more than one side of A4 specifically 
starting with a request to do something specific or consider doing 
something specific, on the basis that a one side of A4 document has more 
chance than a longer letter of being read than being put on the side 
"for when I am not so busy" which in practice may never arrive, and to 
make it clear what you are wanting done, so that if the recipient of the 
letter is minded to be as helpful as possible to you then it is actually 
clear as to what you want done. I appreciate that with the letter there 
needs to be the detailed document and I also appreciate that this 
mailing list may not be to where you would send such a letter.

I started to have a look through your document and I noticed that you 
mention teletext. I was involved with teletext, mostly in the 1970s, yet 
I am still interested so could you say what you are suggesting please? 
In particular, are you suggesting a way to store in a file suitable for 
use in a Unicode context the teletext colour codes for both teletext 
alphanumerics and teletext graphics?

I am an end user of software programs and not a developer and my 
experience of programming is mostly in advising undergraduates on 
electrical and electronic engineering courses and on an information 
systems engineering course who were learning to write scientific 
programs, and I do not have detailed knowledge of the underlying systems 
software. As a result I am somewhat wary of having control codes other 
than the basic few used for carriage return and line feed as trying to 
use them in say, WordPad, can be problematic.

So I am wondering if it could be helpful to have a format as well where 
each of the control codes in what you are doing could be replaced on a 
round-trip-is-possible basis with plane 14 tag characters so as to 
produce a file format that could be suitable for a Unicode environment. 
I appreciate that is possible that this suggestion might possibly be 
unsuitable for some reason, but I mention it in case the suggestion 
might perhaps be useful.

Perhaps in a Unicode text system a good solution would be for 
Unicode/ISO IEC 10646 to have some (not yet encoded) non-printing codes 
added in plane 14 that are treated as not control codes in most uses yet 
can be treated as control codes in specific situations. This would mean 
that a file containing them would not contain Unicode control codes so 
could be stored and shared as a text file, yet when applied to specific 
equipment of specific software packages could be treated as if 
containing control codes.

William Overington

Saturday 6 January 2024


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20240106/a88aa84d/attachment-0001.htm>